The Approach

The Results

14% decrease in cost per click

67% increase in conversion rate

33% decrease in cost per quality visit

Generating qualified leads

As an experienced digital marketing leader and subsidiary of Omnicom Media Group, OMD wanted to generate more qualified visits to the Nissan website. To approach this challenge, the agency decided to see whether automated bidding could achieve this better than manual bidding for display and video ads. A qualified visit is recorded when a potential customer views multiple website pages or completes actions that indicate a greater intent to purchase, like watching a video or using a car configurator. To find out whether automated bidding could outperform manual bidding, the agency recommended that its longtime partner Nissan run head-to-head tests between the two approaches and compare the results.

Testing machine learning for bidding

Google Display & Video 360 automated bidding uses advanced machine learning to help marketers tailor the right bid to each and every auction. It factors in a wide range of auction-time signals — including device, location, time of day, remarketing list, language, and operating system — to capture the unique context of every impression.

Nissan and OMD found that automated-bidding algorithms worked in synergy with OMD’s custom settings, like curated placement lists, private deals, and advanced brand safety controls. As a result, OMD was able to optimize campaigns in real time and find more qualified customers at scale, all while providing control over where the ads were displayed. Had they stuck with a manual approach, the team would have needed to invest time to create new campaigns for each ad format to reach a similar outcome. And it’s nearly impossible to optimize bids manually in real time.

The algorithms act as extensions of the OMD analysts. They analyze the campaign performance at a granular level to ensure the optimizations are more accurate and deliver faster results based on our parameters. Even our initial test results are proving the effectiveness of automation.

Alex Kraft,
Managing Partner,
Omnicom Media Group

Boosting conversion rates

OMD saw the cost per qualified visit decrease by 33%, as well as a 14% decrease in cost per click. But most importantly, the team saw a 67% increase in the conversion rate because automated bidding was able to boost performance and find higher-quality leads than any campaign in the past. Despite higher cost per thousand, the overall return on investment rose significantly, which means that higher costs can lead to better outcomes.

It is exciting to see what performance uplift is possible within an already highly optimized campaign by switching from manual optimization to an automated bidding algorithm. We will continue to use this approach and expand it to other campaigns.

By using new practices for automation, OMD gave Nissan a more effective way to reach interested customers who are most likely to make a purchase. And for the client, the clear benefits have inspired wider use of the strategy for all its campaigns.